May 6, 2013

The World's "Smallest" Movie Is A Viral Hit

Last week, IBM posted online a short animated film which is a fairly crude rendition of a boy and a bouncing ball that he plays with. It would be an unremarkable achievement in animation if not for the fact that the items being animated were atoms which had been magnified 100 million times so they could be visible to the human eye. 

This 1 minute video, A BOY AND HIS ATOM (which is essentially a clever ad for IBM) has garnered nearly 3 million hits since its debut. But what's almost even better, or at least a little more interesting to me as a filmmaker, is the behind the scenes process of making a movie with atoms. As it turns out, they are more difficult to deal with than actors!  :)  Anyway, you can watch the story behind IBM's atom film on YouTube as well.